Those of us who've had the opportunity to know the deaf or blind/visually impaired have had a small glimpse into an entirely new world where connectively tools must work differently. The deaf "hear" with their eyes and the blind "see" with their ears. As a consequence, mobile phones that rely on both audio and visual functions rarely serve their needs straight out of the box. To address this a variety of helpful mobile apps have entered the market and are revolutionizing communications for the deaf and blind.

Remember the days of your computer mouse getting a little squirrely and the remedy being to partially disassemble the mouse and do away with all of the lint, dirt, and general desk gunk that had found its way onto the roller ball and its sensors? (Which were also the days where a mousepad was mandatory. And the roller ball made a pretty great toy too.) Thanks to Microsoft, that is fortunately a distant memory as on April 14, 1999 their first optical computer mouse was introduced at a tech convention in Las Vegas and eventually revolutionized our mousing habits.

Pandora, the largest streaming audio service in the United States, recently selected OpenText Media Management as the storage solution for its audio and display advertising assets. Pandora, as many are familiar, is powered by the Music Genome Project and intelligently selects music based on a users' thumbs up or down of various streamed tracks. It also offers a great advertising opportunity with this detailed information on user preferences. With that information, Pandora can serve targeted, scalable ads to help advertisers hit their mark. OpenText Media Management will serve the entire

Have you heard of Refrigerdating? It's like Tinder, only instead of using your favorite selfie as a profile picture you use a picture of what's going on in your fridge (a "fridgefie"?) for potential matches to swipe through. The app comes by way of Samsung, best known for phones and TVs, but they're also in the kitchen appliance game and their Family Hub Refrigerator sports a camera that checks fridge inventory for you. To promote this camera feature Samsung crafted the dating app that automatically loads a picture of your fridge contents to y

This year at CES 2019, Segway announced its new Loomo Delivery product, a robot developed to handle deliveries in buildings and malls. Fully autonomous, Loomo Delivery can navigate around obstacles and through crowds and handle tasks such as mail delivery (straight from the mail carrier) and moving documents through an office environment. It could even bring you a snack. They're smart enough to figure out where deliveries need to go, and feature interactive screens, and can even work an elevator. Its cloud or 4G connectivity also handles dispatch, updates, scheduling, and monitoring.

Kroger, a large player in the American grocery chain market, recently launched a trial of smart technology to make shopping easier for consumers and managing stock easier on store employees. This technology, developed by Microsoft on their Azure cloud platform, utilizes digital displays located on shelves in place of paper price tags as well as the customer's smartphone or a store-supplied device.

We all know the irritation of seeing our phones light up with a number we don't recognize - more often than not it's a spam call promising that we've won an exciting vacation or that the IRS is hunting us down. Sadly, little progress has been made to stem the flow of these scams and they must be working because the spammers keep at it. These calls, often coined "robocalls" due to the tech used to automatically dial numbers, sadly numbered over 5.1 billion in November 2018. This is the highest number ever recorded and is up from 2.9 billion at the beginning of this year.

Black Friday 2018 has come and gone, and the results are in - more and more consumers are placing their holiday gift orders through mobile devices. According to Adobe Analytics, nearly half of this year's holiday browsing (not always resulting in a purchase) was placed on smartphones - while millions of dollars worth of orders were placed on devices.

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PaperFree recently had the opportunity to sponsor the Single A Muckdogs little league team's end of season pizza party. The team, a part of the Vista American Little League, enjoyed the celebration and looks forward to next season!